


The One

by tockwhoticks



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Oneshot, Time - Freeform, carlos is confused, cecil is distracting, time just doesn't work here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tockwhoticks/pseuds/tockwhoticks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos thinks about time and, of course, Cecil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One

When Carlos first heard the man talking about him on the radio, he thought it was some sort of public joke at his expensive, one he didn’t really understand, but then again, he never really had. He wasn’t offended; it just made him feel awkward walking around town, like everyone else in Night Vale knew something about him that he didn’t yet.

  After his co-worked had managed to convince him that no, this was real, and the man’s name was Cecil Palmer, he started changing the station when the show came on, but, because it was one of the few comprehendible and actually informative shows in Night Vale, he sometimes found himself way through an experiment when he realized that the man on the radio had been crooning sweet nothings about him over the airwaves for – well, how long exactly? Who knew?

  It didn’t matter, of course, but it wasn’t as though time worked here in the same way as it did everywhere else. Time sort of jumped around as it liked in Night Vale, and Carlos would find himself halfway through lunch at Big Rico’s when the sun started to set, or on his way to the lab at five thirty by his watch but eight by someone else’s. If he didn't know any better he'd have thought that it did it on purpose to confuse him when he least needed it, but that was impossible, of course. Expressing this opinions to Cecil would have earned him a stern look and a talking to about blood stone circles.

  _Cecil._

  Because of time’s irregularity, Carlos found it hard to say how long he had been in Night Vale when he started dating Cecil Palmer. It had been a year, maybe, judging from the letters he got from his mother and sister from back home, but it felt like less and more time both at once. Less, of course, when it came to Cecil and the way he smiled and the way the sun would flick off his golden hair when he laughed at something Carlos had said and the way he – the way he distracted chains of scientific thought, but it felt like more when Carlos thought about the buzzing shadow people, and the Void and the Sheriff’s Secret Police (the only ‘secret’ being why they still used the adjective to refer to themselves when clearly they seemed to be just the opposite, not, of course, that Carlos could every voice this aloud lest he be met by Cecil’s patronizing smile.).

  He loved Cecil, of course – how could anyone not love Cecil? – but he didn’t understand him, and on a scientific level he found it more than a little irritating when Cecil would wink at him and he would flush to the roots of his hair like some teenager and not a thirty year old man. There wasn’t any rational explanation for why Cecil and Cecil alone never failed to make him feel and act like a fifteen year old every time he came into the room or slipped his pale arm through Carlos’s tan one. He had never felt like this before. Being a scientist, he knew there couldn’t be such a thing as The One, but, if one allowed oneself to believe that there was, Cecil looked a damn lot like it.

  There were so many things Carlos wanted to think about Cecil, about Night Vale, about time and everything that came with the word both in Night Vale and out, but there was a certain show airing in a few minutes and there are some things, no matter the misunderstandings and the irregularities, that don’t change, no matter what.


End file.
